Besides a focus on painting, de Almeida e Silva (actual name Nuno Fernandes) occasionally engages in performance art that ironically comments on art practice. A bottle filled with the ashes of poorly executed drawings or a booth containing the artist’s prints where the artist pays the new owner one eurocent to acquire a print – these performances show his ironic distance from the craft of painting. For their part, Fernandes’ canvases depict a wild, but strictly controlled, combination of hallucinogenic colors and figures based on both exotic and political influences.
Pavel Vančát